I am thinking about getting a tropical fish tank again. A small one this time. I think the hobby of raising tropical fish would be a good investment of my time, energy and pleasure.  They are not easy to persuade to propagate except, notably, the guppy.

Over the years I have owned several tanks that I have outfitted for keeping, rather than raising different breeds of tropicals.  The guppy is a live bearer and does it constantly and we can learn a lot by observing this fish and its habits.  The male is colorful while the lady is drab.  But, that is surely the point of the GUPPY SYNDROME that I want to talk about.

You see, these fish swim through a soup of sperm that the male constantly releases in his role to inseminate ANY placid female. She, while larger and less colorful, is the object any male who swims with one purpose in life which is to use his male apparatus to sidle up near a female genital opening.  This is usually a hit or miss operation with mostly misses, but the sperm is loosed in the medium in which they swim and live so the metaphor of them swimming through a soup of sex is not far off the mark although the male often is.  And, the female is usually pregnant by default.

The GUPPY SYNDROM is my description of the human world of male and female.  From puberty on there is this guppy-like dance, and sex is ever present in all of human discourse.  We see this exaggerated in today’s “liberated” media where foul-mouthed disk jockeys exchange raunchy quips with foul-mouthed callers who have few things on their minds other than instigating physical male response to female presence on the planet.

Females of all species are subject to the GUPPY interest which is all the time in all ways.  The male is always pressing his interest in and need to spurt that sperm.  The female partner in the dance, if awash in hormones, must constantly make choices either to ignore advances or dance.

The male of our species is no less active than the male of the guppy species.  He cannot help his interest in or his constant actively thinking if not doing something about the urges that push him into trying to inseminate the female.  She is the arbiter of whose intimacies she will accept.  We are a lot luckier in our world than guppies in theirs because our females are not constantly pregnant.  The attempt to inseminate females in the guppy world seems to be a colorful and flashy dance. In our human world there seems to be the same dance except for rape, incest and constant unwanted importuning or are both worlds the same? I am going to get a fish tank to study, once again,

                                                 the GUPPY SYNDROME.